


Ferae Naturae

by xerospark



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 14:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11671329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xerospark/pseuds/xerospark
Summary: Planet Altea was never destroyed, instead surrendering to the Galra's forces. Decades later, the massive Galran-Altean Alliance conquers Earth for its ample resources. Faced with what to do with the billions of humans now at their disposal, a decision is made to sell them off as exotic pets, claiming their inability to sense quintessence is a sign that they can't be more intelligent than the average yupper. After all, almost everything in the universe can sense quintessence.Pidge is bought by an Altean-run research study testing human intelligence. It doesn't take long for her to realize that more is going on beyond the dehumanization of her entire species, and if she's lucky the answers that help her escape and find her family may be the same answers that get humanity home.





	Ferae Naturae

Katie thought her world had ended with the Kerberos mission. She'd had no way of knowing that the end was only just beginning. 

The ships appeared overnight, out of nowhere. Everyone had gone to sleep after a normal, boring day and woken up to every news outlet in the country running the headlines: GALAXY GARRISON CONFIRMS UNKNOWN SHIPS IN EARTH ORBIT, SPACECRAFT OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN SPOTTED BY SENSORS, POTENTIAL ALIEN LIFE DISCOVERED IN ATMOSPHERE. It wasn’t long before the first blurry pictures began appearing on air and across social media, showing a white shape unlike anything Earth’s various space programs had ever produced. Following pictures refined the image to a sleek craft estimated to be the approximate size of an aircraft carrier, with sharp white edges that cut sharply against the black vastness of space.

The human response was immediate. Many panicked, obviously, cleaning the shelves in grocery stores wherever possible. Church attendance spiked worldwide, and the doomsdayers that often dotted big city street corners and college campuses were out in droves. World leaders issued statements and arranged for press conferences, and the American president briefly became a meme despite humanity’s collective anxiety when his speech was discovered by listeners to share one too many similarities with the one from a certain late twentieth century movie.

For every person out looting shops or proclaiming the apocalypse, though, there were plenty who simply stayed home, riveted to their TVs as each Earth attempt to contact the mysterious vessel failed. They held their families close and tried their best to come to terms with knowing that everything had irrevocably changed. There could be no going back from this – first contact with extraterrestrial life, even if that life was an enigmatic unknown. They were helpless to do anything but hope against hope that the aliens were peaceful, that Galaxy Garrison’s bulletins were cautious and nothing bad would come of this.

Four days passed, and humanity began to let out a sigh of relief.

Then the second ship appeared. Then the third, right on its heels. Then the fourth, and fifth, and sixth…

\- - - - - 

The first thing Katie noticed when she was shaken awake at the unholy hour of five thirty in the morning was the stress in her mother’s eyes, barely contained by a veneer of steely calm. “Katie, honey, I need you to pack your things. Everything you’ll need for a long trip, but only the essentials, you understand?”

Katie pawed sleepily at the covers, levering herself into a rough sitting position. “Mom? What-?”

“Just _do_ it, Katie.” Her mother threw open the doors of her closet, grabbing her suitcase and tossing it out to the middle of the floor. “Bring your boots and some warm jackets, but leave one out to wear – it’s about thirty degrees outside. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to leave most of your projects to make room in the car-”

“Mom!” Katie cut in, sitting up straighter. “What’s going on? Where are we going?”

Her mother’s half-frantic movements paused; with her back turned to the bed, all Katie could see to gauge her mood by was her hand, grasping the edge of her closet door so tightly that her knuckles were white and shaky. After a long moment, she heard her take a shaky breath. “There’s a whole fleet in orbit now, not just the one ship. The Garrison is mobilizing to defensive positions worldwide, but against such an unknown quantity-”

Katie shoved her covers towards the foot of her bed and untangled her legs from her sheets. “I don’t trust the Galaxy Garrison to protect us from papercuts, much less aliens. Are they attacking us?”

“Not yet,” her mother said, “but I’m not taking any chances.”

The _not with the only family I have left_ remained unspoken.

Katie vaulted out of bed and towards the closet, brushing past her mother to get at her clothes. “What are we doing about food? Gunther? What about-”

“Already taken care of – as much food and water in the car as could fit, all of Gunther’s things, some maps in case something happens to our phones. All that’s left is your room and the medicine cabinet. I wanted-” Her mother’s businesslike tone faltered. “I wanted to let you sleep as late as I could.”

_Oh._ Katie’s hands paused in their task of taking shirts off their hangers, and she turned to throw her arms around her mother, burying her face in her shoulder. For all they knew, aliens had come to turn their whole solar system to space dust, and still her mother had done everything she could for her comfort. She could barely breathe past the lump in her throat – that, and the sudden, terrifying knowledge that oh, god, this was really happening.

Her mother squeezed her back hard for a long moment, then broke away with visible reluctance. “I’ll take care of the medicine cabinet,” she said. “We’re leaving in ten.”

Katie nodded shakily and went back to stuffing her suitcase as full of clothes as she could. Most of her projects were too big, as her mother had predicted, but hopefully she could fit a couple of the smallest ones? And some paper and pencils, just in case.

It took the whole ten minutes to get dressed and pack, but by the time her mom knocked on her door, Katie was just struggling to get the zipper on her suitcase closed. “Are you ready?”

“Let’s go,” Katie said, getting to her feet.

It took longer than she’d have liked to get the heavy suitcase down the stairs, but it gave her time to go back over the list of essentials in her head and make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Her laptop was in its case in her backpack, and she trusted her mom when she said she’d gotten all the medicine in the house. Was there anything else she couldn’t afford to leave?

The realization hit her like a freight train. “I’ll be right back!” she shouted to her mom, bolting back up the stairs. She heard her suitcase clatter to the floor behind her and her mother calling her name, but she didn’t waste breath on answering, racing to a door at the end of the downstairs hallway – a door that had been closed for months, but that she couldn’t afford to leave as it was.

For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Katie stepped into her older brother’s room. She barely processed the mess – they’d left it just as it had been when he shipped out to Kerberos, unable to work up the heart to clean after the news had broken – and made a beeline straight for his bedside table. There were only two things on it, a framed photograph and the case holding his spare pair of glasses; she grabbed both of them, careful despite herself not to disturb anything else, and shut the door behind her as she left.

She took one last moment to look into her own room, committing as much as she could into memory. Then she took off down the stairs towards her mother and didn’t look back.

Her mother looked ready to detonate from stress alone by the time Katie reappeared, but when she laid eyes on the objects clutched carefully in her arms, she deflated with a sigh. “Do you have everything you need?”

“I do now,” Katie said.

They shoved the suitcase in the last remaining space available in the backseat of their car, practically on top of Gunther’s paws. Katie’s backpack went by her feet in the passenger seat, and as they backed out of the driveway and turned onto the street she pulled her knees up to her chest. All the other houses in their neighborhood were dark and silent, and she wondered what it would be like in a few hours, when everyone woke up to realize what was happening. They’d locked their house just in case of looting, even if it probably wouldn’t stop anyone who was motivated enough, but there was probably going to be a panic that had put the events of the past few days to shame.

Would there be any coming back from this for humanity?

Katie watched her house disappear into the distance, and she had a feeling that it would be the last she saw of it for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> i have absolutely no update schedule for this figured out yet, but i wanted to get this out before S3 comes out on friday so that i can officially have it known that i did not take S3 into account for my outline for a reason.


End file.
